In a hot, dusty car park within sight of Ibiza’s old town, but a world away from the hedonistic clubs and bougainvillea-lined villas of the Balearic Island, Ami Mohamed-Ali sits in his van patiently nursing the first of three cups of coffee in the late afternoon. strong tea.
“The first glass is bitter as life,” says the 33-year-old seasonal worker from Western Sahara, quoting an old refrain. “The second is sweet, like love, and the third is gentle, like death.” As he adjusts the camp stove and pours the liquid from glass to glass to ensure a decent head, Mohamed-Ali reflects on his living space without a trace of life’s bitterness. So what if this van is his home for the next six months?
“I don’t like to complain, because I come from a refugee camp where thousands of people live,” he says. “Moreover, I am much better off than many of my compatriots who live in the desert.”
Mohamed-Ali is among a growing number of locals and foreign workers who are finding themselves locked out of the Ibiza rental market. Faced with exorbitant rents for cramped, shared homes, many have little choice but to live in vans, caravans or tents.
In Ibiza – as in neighboring Mallorca and the Canary Islands – it is becoming increasingly clear that neither the island nor the housing market can support the huge numbers of tourists arriving every year.
“Over the past five years – but especially since the pandemic – people have felt that everything is oversaturated, that more and more tourists are coming, and that leads to roads and public services becoming overloaded,” says Rafael Giménez of Prou Eivissa (Enough Ibiza), a group campaigning for limits on the number of visitors and vehicles on the island.
“Ibiza is an island, so housing is by definition limited. The law of supply and demand has completely failed.”
Tourism accounts for 84% of the island’s economy and last year a record number of 3.7 million tourists visited Ibiza and the smaller neighboring island of Formentera, whose combined population is around 160,000.
Giménez emphasizes that Prou Eivissa is not against tourism. The problem, he says, is overtourism, the issue that led tens of thousands of people to protest in the Canary Islands last month, and which was behind Prou’s hundreds-strong demonstration outside the seat of Ibiza’s government on Friday evening. Similar protests will take place in Mallorca this weekend.
“Tourism has always been there – it was here when I was growing up – but there was a balance,” he says. “It’s not that we don’t want tourism; that is not the case at all. But when it starts directly affecting your life, things get out of hand.”
Giménez says vacation homes and the proliferation of tourist apartments are not the only problem. “The fact that you have more tourists and more tourist properties means you need more workers from elsewhere to work in the shops, bars and restaurants,” he says. “These workers need more housing and there has been a demographic explosion – not because Ibians are having children, but because mass tourism needs many more people to come here.”
Nowadays, he adds, it is common for up to eight people to share a three-bedroom flat, and rents have almost doubled in the past decade, from €800 to €900 a month to at least €1,500 – and beyond . than in high season.
Iván Fidalgo, a Guardia Civil official and local coordinator for the Spanish Association of Civil Guards, says the lack of affordable housing in Ibiza makes life very difficult for public sector workers, and his police force is struggling to recruit new officers to replace the pensioner.
“No one wants to be posted here,” he says. “Nobody in their right mind will want to come and live and work in Ibiza because they won’t find anywhere to live.”
Fidalgo says this undermines the force’s ability to do its job, adding guardias civiles have also been forced into drastic housing solutions.
“Next summer there will be colleagues living in vans or caravans like last year or previous years,” he says. “We just feel powerless.”
Federico Faggi, spokesman for the tenants’ union in Ibiza and Formentera, says the situation is the result of uncontrolled tourist growth, exacerbated by speculation about vulture funds and the recent influx of Northern European digital nomads whose high salaries allow them to cover the rental prices that are far above means. of the local population.
Earlier this month, Marga Prohens, the regional president of the Balearic Islands, acknowledged growing anger over uncontrolled tourism. “This government understands that borders are necessary,” she said. “We must find a way to guarantee coexistence between tourist activities and the well-being of the inhabitants of the Balearic Islands.”
Mariano Juan, the Vice President of the Government of Ibiza to advise, says that although he understands the malaise that led to Friday’s demonstration, the problem is not with tourism, but with illegal tourism. He says Ibiza’s tourism capacity has shrunk from around 109,000 beds to just under 100,000 over the past two decades as smaller hotels have closed or reduced their rooms to focus on quality rather than quantity.
“If the organization organizing the demonstration proposes … to reduce the number of legal tourist sites, then we may not be addressing the core of the problem, which is the illegal market,” he said. “It’s the thousands of listings on Airbnb and the hundreds on Booking.com. It’s all mushroomed since social networks have made it easier to find illegal accommodation.”
The key to combating tourist saturation, he adds, is “a life-and-death struggle against illegal tourist rentals.” To achieve that goal, he says, the Ibiza government has cracked down on illegal landlords, who can be fined €40,000 just for advertising illegal rentals. Juan says the to advise had already collected fines totaling more than €2 million and has almost 200 cases against illegal tourist apartments on various rental platforms. In the meantime, it works with Airbnb, among others, to root out illegal hosts and uses municipal inspectors to make undercover bookings.
Juan also points out that measures to limit the number of cars coming to the island by ferry will be discussed in the regional parliament in the coming months, saying authorities have worked hard to attract different types of visitors.
“For years the to advise has worked to promote family, sports, gastronomic, medical and conference tourism,” he adds. “Five or ten years ago we dreamed that the tourist season would last five or six months – not just three months of sun and parties. We now have a seven-month season… so we are already succeeding in changing the tourism model.”
Meanwhile, the island’s parking garages and campsites play home to the physically homeless. Given the financial and emotional stress of cramped, shared apartments, some have even come to embrace the freedom of a mobile home.
Leonardo Nogueira, a 45-year-old Uruguayan chef who cooks in private villas, last year swapped his €800-a-month one-bed apartment for a Fiat camper. So far he has no regrets and there is enough room for the essential comfort: his coffee pot, yerba mateguitar, surfboard and bicycle.
“Finding a place to live here is a real problem,” he says. “I know couples here who are separated, but who have to continue living together – one on the couch and one in the bedroom – because they have nowhere else to go… Here I have solar panels, electricity and heating. I am now a self-sufficient, sustainable snail.”
Equally phlegmatic is Felipe Keilis-Carrasco, a musician from Argentina who plays with his friends in clubs, bars, weddings and birthdays. cumbia band. After leaving the rental market behind, his home is now an old caravan he bought for €2,000.
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” he says. “It’s not a house in the mountains; it’s not the most luxurious place, but compared to the conditions of some seasonal workers – a small, nasty room – it’s fine. And it’s better than spending $700 a month on a place you share with ten other people. We are a small community here.”
A sense of community is evident in the way the parking garage residents greet each other when they come home after a long day of work, and in the way Mohamed-Ali has befriended the Moroccans in the tent next to his van as he cooked for them. so they don’t have to live on sandwiches. Most are also united by concerns about a fine and prosecution by the police.
However, such equanimity is not universal. A Romanian man, who does not want to be named, has now spent two of his 10 years in Ibiza, living in a caravan. “Things won’t change; they will only get worse,” he says. “This is an island for rich people.”